Reverse the Verse: April 22nd, 2016

This was an upgrade we did. If you can't afford a Ferrari or a Porsche or something, you can get a Ferrari body kit that you put over your Honda so it looks like it's that car. It was essentially that for the Hornet, and we did it for a veterans' charity back in, I want to say, 2014. And it basically makes your F7C look like an F7A.

They'll still have the hardpoints of the F7C. They'll still have the performance of the F7C.

Except where geometry defies performance, which is in some areas. If you remember Dan Gheesling, the community ambassador on TNG, he actually helped put together the post about the charity thing, and he did the fiction behind it, because he was here. He wanted to see how we did community management, and that was the first time we got to meet him, and it was fun. He did a good job writing.

The ATV Fast Forward this week was the continuing development on AI subsumption, specifically the perception system. There's text on the thing, so you can read what each line does. But the blue line is where they can hear you, and that's where they think you are based on hearing. The yellow line is where they see you, where they actually physically know you are. The red line is where they saw you but they can't see you now, so this is where they're thinking you are based on where they last saw you and what they can hear and stuff. It's very cool, it works on multiple levels. As far as the actual level, I don't know what the level is. It's a gas station.

So the big challenge for any AI: it's very easy to make an AI that will always get you. People are like, oh, the AI is stupid. The great challenge is to make AI stupid. If I'm a computer, I'm like, okay, X is Jared, and Jared is always this. I can always know where to shoot him. I can get him every time. The goal is to simulate AI characters who have some limits to their perception, who make mistakes, but then are still challenging.

They make the mistakes, but they have corrective measures so they can adjust for that and stuff. It's very cool, the work they're doing on the AI stuff, which I believe is being spearheaded primarily in Frankfurt now. So it's super exciting. That day when we have all the AI in ArcCorp, that'll be a great day, and it truly feels like a living, breathing place, and you can go through and watch everybody's little individual stories going on.

To be more specific, that level is the vertical slice level for Squadron 42, where they basically take a vertical slice of the entire game that has every little aspect of the campaign and have it in one level just for testing purposes. So it is a gas station where they basically have all the different Squadron 42 features jam-packed.

You will see 10 for the Developers. That was one of the better ideas that Thomas Hennessy had, and I'm still super proud of him for it to this day, where we take people from the different disciplines and combine them together to get a more robust Q&A.

So I think we'll continue with the developers. Eric Davis will be the next one.

Mark Skelton and Eric Davis will be the next one. There's a pair.

And then Omar and Adam.

So we'll get some artists in there, we'll get some designers, we'll get some engineers, we'll get some producers. So we mix them up. I think we get much better results when we mix them up. So 10 for the Developers.

But that won't be for a few weeks.

Yeah, we've got a Chris Roberts one next week, and then the other two that were just described the following two weeks.

It's just an iron-on. You can iron on or sew them. And if you just Google ironing on patches... I'm not sure if you need to put something over when you put the iron on them or what.

I will tell you what I did with mine. I got the original Army, Navy and Marine patches, and I got them put on hats, like the old military hats. I Googled embroidery and took them to an embroidery/seamstress place, and just gave them and said, would you put these on, someone who knows how to do it, and it was like $8.

But you can also iron them, or they come with a little sewing kit.

I think when you do a hat, because it's curved, the iron is going to pop up.

I've seen people turn their shirts inside out and iron on the thin side.

Yeah, iron it from the back then.

I guess, what's the context?

Well, I think they're still making concept art. Stanton's been sharing concept art of the interior. We're still concepting out the entire interior. They do their art in 3D, but it's not being built into CryEngine just yet. So they're still developing it, doing paint-overs, figuring out lighting schemes and color palette and stuff like that. And then even on the outside, there's been some minor changes. Things got bigger, things got wider and whatnot. So they're reconcepting the stuff that fills in all that stuff. So concept isn't just something that happens at the very beginning and then you stop.

You continually do a little bit more concept throughout, especially for some of those earlier ships where we didn't do the interior at the same time as the exterior.

And basically, all the work that you do before you build it is concept in one way, shape, or form.

I'm a gamepad guy, personally. I've spent so many years as a console fan that now I've just become used to it.

I'll always fly with the HOTAS, but I do like the gamepad for walking around.

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm personally annoyed by having to switch. It's just a personal thing. So I tend to gravitate towards a gamepad because it can be used for everything. And I don't talk to people online, so I don't need the keyboard. But yeah, you're a big HOTAS guy. We do our Wing Commander streams. He sits there, he goes, all right, test this before we're doing it. He does the keyboard, and he destroys everything on the keyboard. He just runs through the levels. He goes, all right, now bring me my joystick. He's absolutely capable of annihilating the game on the keyboard alone, but he's always like, no, bring me the joystick. And then we couldn't get that joystick working. I'm like, well, you just used the keyboard. No, I need a joystick. And we had to go get another joystick. Ben's big on the joysticks.

Ideally, I would have an original Thrustmaster F-22 and a TQS and rudder pedals.

Well, the cool thing about the gamepad, at least for me, with the social aspects of the game, is the variable movement with the thumbsticks. So you can walk really slow and then speed up. And so I like that. Mostly probably mouse and keyboard plus gamepad for me, swapping between the two.

That's one of the things I like most about this, our efforts towards being controller agnostic.

No wrong answer.